On the interpassivity of collecting
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On the interpassivity of collecting Stacy Thompson Department of English, 4102 Centennial Hall, University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, 1698 Park Avenue, Eau Claire, WI 54701, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
Through his concept of ‘‘interpassivity,’’ Robert Pfaller explains a range of cultural practices people employ to delegate belief or enjoyment to an agency or object apart from themselves. In this article, I describe how expanding upon Pfaller’s concept can cast light on the cultural practice of collecting. First, I argue that collecting can either be practiced perversely with pleasure or obsessively without pleasure. Second, using Brazilian millionaire Zero Freitas’s accumulation of a six-million-unit record collection as an example, I illustrate how collections can enjoy their objects for us and save us the trouble of having to take pleasure in them. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41282-02000196-z Keywords: interpassivity; Robert Pfaller; collecting; libido
I Want to Believe In 2013, Kmart’s ‘‘Ship my Pants’’ YouTube commercial went viral. Upon viewing the ad, it is difficult not to hear its first line of dialogue as ‘‘I can shit my pants? Right here? Shit my pants, you’re kidding!’’ (Kmart, 2013). Within a few seconds, it becomes clear that the ad is comedically introducing a new Kmart shipping policy, but, momentarily, it feels as if something profane has popped up in a major brand internet spot. One might wonder how Kmart got away with it. After all, viewers might initially think that Kmart has violated a social norm – even if the ad doesn’t literally use the word ‘‘shit.’’ So what exactly is humorous or enjoyable about the ad? Is it not that we experience it in two registers simultaneously?
2020 Springer Nature Limited. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society www.palgrave.com/journals
Thompson
At this point, it is worth posing a naı¨ve question: Who is actually fooled by the ad’s manifest content? Let’s assume that no one is fooled. Furthermore, what if this is precisely why we take pleasure in it? We do so, in other words, because we enjoy our recognition that we are not duped by it. Slavoj Zˇizˇek (2009) argues that ordinary, everyday situations like the Kmart ad perfectly illustrate one of the modes in which the Symbolic Order operates. In this example, we delegate the task of believing that the ad is not profane to the big Other in its guise as the subject-who-is-supposed-to-believe, a version of the big Other that believes for us. In the case of ‘‘Ship My Pants,’’ our enjoyment stems from the illusion that the big Other believes that nothing profane was said or even implied. The one-who-is-supposed-to-know has been fooled, while we haven’t been and can therefore laugh at the big Other’s expense. It is a somewhat complicated form of enjoyment at one remove. It is not so much the profanity of the ad that we take pleasure in but the fact that a supposed agency doesn’t register that profanity. In 1996, Robert Pfaller (2014) introduced a new way of th
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